Conventionally, cloth rollers in a loom have been exchanged by stopping the loom to manually cut the cloth in the transverse direction thereof when a cloth roller has taken up a given amount of cloth; removing the cloth roller from the loom to transfer it to a truck; mounting an empty roller on the loom to allow it to take up the cut cloth; and then starting the loom. This conventional method, however, is very time consuming. Particularly, in a high-speed loom, the output thereof is inevitably decreased by stopping the machine.
Some attempts have been made to automate the roller exchanging operation by utilizing robotics, but a robot is not yet available for conducting such operation speedily and without stopping the loom.